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Paula's Day in Court

Updated June 26, 1996 12:01 a.m. ET

The law of course proceeds at its own majestic pace, and the Supreme Court is entitled to time to ponder the issues presented by the sexual harassment case against President Clinton by Paula Corbin Jones. Still, the delay in bringing the case to trial leaves voters rather at sea. The case against the President will still be pending when they are asked to decide yea or nay on his re-election in November.

This is all the more perplexing because there is no guarantee the Court will ultimately rule in the President's favor. It has agreed to decide whether a civil suit against a sitting President should be delayed until he leaves office, thus postponing Mrs. Jones's day in court until after Mr. Clinton's re-election campaign. But the Circuit Court decided that the case should proceed; that the Constitution "did not create a monarchy." If the Supreme Court ultimately agrees, and if in the meantime Mr. Clinton wins re-election, Jones v. Clinton could become a spectacle dominating his second term.

To give readers and voters some appreciation of the stakes involved, we reprint nearby substantial excerpts from Mrs. Jones's original complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Arkansas. These are of course unproven allegations; the President says he has no recollection of meeting her. Yet at the same time these extracts come from official court documents on the public record, as opposed to rumor or hearsay. Different people will make different judgments on their credibility and relevance, but given the importance of an informed electorate and the public venue of the charges, we think the public has a right to know.

All the more so since the phrase "sexual harassment" has been expanded to embrace an almost endless array of workaday insensitivities. What Mrs. Jones alleges is instead an explicit sexual advance of the grossest order, by the chief executive of her employer, and with references to her departmental supervisor. Followed, when her story started to emerge, by a widely reported assault on her character from the White House itself. With or without current sensibilities, these are certainly serious charges.

The press, ourselves included, has suffered considerable confusion on the issue of reporting the sexual activities of politicians. We suspect that a suit like Mrs. Jones's would be front-page news immediately if brought against, say, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company--or for that matter a television evangelist or Hollywood actor. Yet with politicians in particular, we're torn between an imperative to inform the public and the sensible notion that even public figures are entitled to some final sphere of privacy.

This tension has resulted in a series of bizarre standards. John F. Kennedy charmed his way to a free pass, no doubt aided by the different mores of the age. His brother survived as a Senator after the death at Chappaquiddick, but the issue did hamstring his Presidential bid. Gary Hart was run out of a Presidential campaign over Donna Rice. Anita Hill was used to put Clarence Thomas through a ringer on far less serious and less recent accusations than those underlying the case just accepted by the court on which Justice Thomas now sits.

Bill Clinton by and large has been the beneficiary of yet another standard. His nationally televised admission of "problems" in his marriage, it runs, immunized him by establishing his philandering. So in the last campaign most of the press dismissed the Gennifer Flowers charges because a tabloid paid for her story. Even our editorials, often charged with malice against Mr. Clinton, did not make much of them. In retrospect, we think this was a mistake. The accounts of Arkansas state troopers later made clear that Ms. Flowers was essentially telling the truth, and Mr. Clinton's denials were essentially lies.

This was an important insight into the character that the Clinton Administration has displayed, not least in the current round of implausible explanations of misappropriated FBI files. By now, in one petty scandal after another, Mr. Clinton has spent any right to credibility. What reason on earth is there to believe his Presidential announcements, whether on tax cuts or Bosnia or the Middle East, let alone invocations of moral values?

There is a trendy notion that the public no longer cares, that indeed it finds Mr. Clinton's various transgressions amusing and charming. Perhaps, but we have a higher view of the public. We think it understands that campaign promises are only promises, and that sinners sin. But we think it can distinguish sin from depravity, and broken promises from credibility meltdown.

In any event, the public is entitled to make its own judgment, which means it is entitled to know what has been charged, without a filtering or bowdlerizing of documents already before the courts and long in the hands of reporters. And far better it should know now than halfway into the next Presidential term.

Paula's Day in Court

The law of course proceeds at its own majestic pace, and the Supreme Court is entitled to time to ponder the issues presented by the sexual harassment case against President Clinton by Paula Corbin Jones.